A boy sleeps with six companions, their beds made of precious treasure, shining baubles and golden armbands, silver vessels and ivory chests, scarlet beads and ropes made of pearls.
A winter storm swirls snow around a monastery where a large encampment of soldiers shelters, some in outbuildings, others in tents. Hanna, in the company of Lions, chops wood. Her face is taut, her body tense, but each time she strikes ax into wood and splits a log she swears, as though she’s trying to chop rage and grief out of herself.
A woman clothed in the robes of a nun meets a sandy-haired, slender young man at the edge of a birch forest. Waves of wind ripple light through silver leaves. To him she gives the leashes of a half-dozen huge black hounds in exchange for a tiny swaddled figure, an infant girl sleeping softly as she is handed over from one grim-faced guardian to the other.
An army marches in good order through the grassy plains of the eastern frontier. Poplars line the banks of creeks and shallow rivers, giving way to hawthorn and dogwood and at last to the broad expanse of feather grass and knapweed. Spring flowers carpet the open lands with white-and-yellow blooms, as numerous as the stars. Is that Sanglant marching at the head of the army, a glorious red cape streaming back from his shoulders and a gold torque winking at his neck? Is that Blessing, grown impossibly old, looking like a well-grown girl of five or six? At the confluence of two rivers, a king waits to receive the army in peace. His banner flies the double-headed eagle of the Ungrian kingdom. Strange that the first gift Sanglant offers to him, as they meet and clasp hands and give each other the kiss of peace, is a wine barrel.
A woman, aged and arthritic, sits in her tower room, writing laboriously. A map lies open on the table beside her, a crude representation of Salia, held down by stones at each curling corner, but the figures on the wax tablet interest Liath more: a horoscope written for a day yet to come, or a day long past, when cataclysm racked the Earth. The elderly cleric lifts her head to call for an attendant. The woman who comes is the same woman who gave the hounds and took the child, although here she looks much older as she offers her mistress a soothing posset.
“What news, Clothilde?” asks the first woman in the tone of a noblewoman born to command. Is this Biscop Tallia, Taillefer’s favorite child? Her voice is already smoky from the growth in her neck that will kill her.
“It is done, Your Grace,” says the other woman, “just as we planned. The girl is pregnant. The child she bears will be related to the emperor through both parents.”